Overview Of Web Navigations

Any good website has a good navigation menu. Without one, you might have the most beautiful web pages with the most inspiring content on them, but no one will be able to easily access them. (It’s like being in the middle of a forest, knowing there are a bunch of towns around you. Without a compass or a map, you won’t know how to get to any of them.)

So let’s explore a bird’s eye view of how navigation works in Nucleus Web. Then we can dive into how to actually create a navigation menu.

Note: While you can technically create a bunch of items in your navigation as placeholders that don’t link to anything, we recommend creating your main web pages first before creating a navigation menu.

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

2 Places To Access Your Navigation

With Nucleus Web, you can add a navigation menu in two places on your site: the Header and Footer. While you aren’t required to have menus in both locations, we recommend having a menu accessible in at least one of those places.

When you have a navigation menu accessible in the Header, it will be “hidden” behind a toggle switch in the top right corner of your website on every page where you have the Header visible.

When you click the Menu toggle, your navigation will open overtop your website.

When you have a navigation menu accessible in the Footer, those items will be visible at all times on every page where you have the Footer visible.

3 Types Of Navigation Menus

Now, what items will showcase in your Header or Footer depends on which of the navigation menus you choose to connect in each location.

Nucleus Web offers three distinct menus you can create: Main, Footer, and Sitemap. You can choose to showcase any one of these three menus in either your Header or Footer.

Here in your Navigation Panel, you can add items and create each individual navigation menu.

Then, in your Design Panel here, you can choose to show or not show a navigation menu in your Header or Footer.

And then which specific navigation menu to showcase if you choose to show a menu.

Note: You can technically showcase the Footer navigation menu in the Header of your website, but why do that and make it more complicated for yourself to keep track of? 😆

For a specific guide on how to create and add a navigation menu to your Header, click here.

For a specific guide on how to create and add a navigation menu to your Footer, click here.

Tips On How To Use Navigation Menus

As alluded to above, you don’t need to utilize both the Header and Footer to have separate navigation menus on your website. However, it’s important to have at least one navigation menu on your website.

Whether that’s located in your Header or Footer is totally up to you! But if you choose to have only one menu, we recommend showcasing it in your Header. This is typically where most navigation menus are located on websites, and thus makes it a familiar place for anyone to find on your website.

The benefit of utilizing a Header and Footer navigation menu affords you the ability to keep your menus cleaner and simpler. Just like a regular map can become too convoluted with details that it makes it more difficult than helpful to navigate, a website navigation menu that’s too cluttered can be less helpful than intended.

What constitutes as feeling too cluttered and convoluted in a menu can depend on a variety of factors:

  • The navigation font family (easy or difficult to read)
  • The navigation font size (larger or smaller)
  • The navigation font style (bold, italic, all caps, etc.)
  • The number of main navigation items
  • The number of parented navigation items (short or long list of items parented under a main item)
  • The total number of navigation items (main and parented items combined)

While there’s no hard and fast rule of thumb to have as a benchmark for whether you have too many items in your navigation menu, just be mindful of how many items you add and how it looks overall while previewing your site, and you should be just fine 😎

What About The Sitemap?

One type of navigation not discussed yet is the Sitemap. Your Sitemap is a type of navigation that search engines (like Google) can use to properly file your website and understand how your website is linked together.

Typically, unless your site contains hundreds of pages or if you don’t have a good navigation menu, you don’t need to worry about creating a separate Sitemap. (This is more of an advanced website feature that most people won’t need to tinker with.)

But if you’re interested in learning more about how to manage your Sitemap, click here.

What Next?

Now that you have a better understanding of how navigation menus work in Nucleus Web, it’s time to begin building yours! Click any of the links below to get started:

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